As you should now be well aware there are two new tanking enchants from Ulduar which our guild can also craft. This thread will look at Blade Ward.
Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.It is important to note this can also stack up to 5 times. No cooldown on proc.
200parry rating at 20% gives about 2% extra parry. This is affected heavily by diminishing returns so a full 5 stacks will be below 10%
Sounds awesome right? Unfortuantly this doesn't seem to be the case.
The proc rate is 1ppm. Even a prot warrior spamming instants every GCD wont expect to see more than 2 procs in a minute. So on average would you expect to have +2% parry for 1/3 of a fight? No because
the buff is consumed on a succesful parry.
This means the enchant is equivalent (on average) to having a constant +0.67% parry. But actually it is worse than that.
You only get the buff lasting the full duration if you don't parry which means it hasn't actually been of any use. If you DO parry it consumes all stacks. Now the interesting thing is that you most likely parried from your base parry rating and not from the buffed parry (which typically represents only 2% of maybe 22% parry rating). This means that
the buff may get consumed without actually benefitting you.
Correct me if I am wrong but assuming a standard parry of 20% and 1 proc giving an additional 2% and bearing in mind that ANY parry will consume the proc then only 10% of parries (whilst the proc is active) can be directly attributed to the enchant. Due to any parry consuming the buff then survivability is actually increased by 0.67%/10=0.067%
Why is this crap?
- Low proc rate
- All stacks of buffs consumed on parry
- If 10secs pass without parrying then enchant hasn't saved you HOWEVER
- If a parry occurs within the 10secs there is up to 90% chance it wasn't due to the buff and the buff is lost
If anyone can prove whether this enchant is useful please feel free to try, but the more I look into it the more I realise it is rubbish.
Without a shadow of a doubt I believe that Blood Draining beats this enchant hands down for main tanking in progression although asumming you are tanking in an environment where you will never go below 35% health then this does help to preserve healers mana by the narrowest of narrow margins.
I am certain that we will see a buff for this enchant either to increase proc chance and/or for it not to be consumed on parry